Can MongoDB Find Love in the Enterprise?

But when it comes to popularity among databases built for the modern era, the open source NoSQL vendor takes the top prize. Its developer edition has been downloaded more 10 million times, 300,000 people have taken MongoDB education classes, it has more than 1,000 technology partners and more than 35,000 users attend its events annually.

But when it comes to the Global 1000, MongoDB doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.

That being said, it's making headway. Not just that, but it’s also demonstrating that it can think beyond the darling developer and show enterprise decision makers that it’s out to delight them as well.

Look at Us!

At MongoDB World this morning a few key announcements drove this point home. Perhaps the most significant is that MongoDB has built a connector to popular data visualization and BI tools such as IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, Tableau and even Excel.

What this means is that corporate users will be able to harness JSON data from sources like web applications, mobile devices, the Internet of Things and social media and make sense of it via tools they’re already familiar with, without a hassle.

Take, for example, the case of a corporate traveler who came to the MongoDB World in New York City this week and wants to get home without encountering a cancelled flight. Should he leave tonight, travel tomorrow or simply wait until the weekend because the probability of getting home as scheduled is very small?

To find the answer, Tableau presented a demo leveraging data from MongoDB World attendees and the Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA) which included filters for flights coming in and out of New York by airline, by status (on time/delayed/canceled), by time and date etc…

Here, courtesy of Tableau, is a demo of what conference attendees watched on stage:

Needless to say, it’s an easy way to leverage a large amount of data to make decision-making simple for business users. And, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about given MongoDB’s core promise — to help organizations move faster, and dramatically simplify access to data to a broader audience.

Of course you can’t talk enterprise without bringing security into the conversation and with its 3.2 release, MongoDB will provide encryption for data at rest. This is a must have for companies in regulated industries such as pharmaceutical, healthcare, financial services and certain government agencies. The new capability could open doors for MongoDB.

A New GUI for Developers and DBAs

While the business pays for MongoDB, it’s the developers and DBAs that make it sing. For them MongoDB 3.2 (coming later this year) will offer a new graphical interface that is currently code named mongoScout. It is being pitched as a powerful, intuitive interface for exploring and understanding data that both displays individual documents and also analyzes collections to visualize the existence of fields and the cardinality of their values.

“Souping up administration tools is never a bad choice for a technology product,” Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research told CMSWire.

Time will tell if this is an IPO year for MongoDB, but one thing is certain. It’s extending its reach beyond the hearts of developers and into the minds of Enterprise IT Managers. After all, at the end of that day, someone has to pay the bills.